John Clang: "I waited twenty years to make this film because I had nothing new to say."

I didn't feel I had anything new to offer. That sounds strange — most people would just make the film anyway. But for me, the work has to matter. It has to add something to the conversation, not just repeat what's already been said. When I was twenty-three, I could see that I didn't understand enough about life, about loss, about how time actually works in a person's interior. I needed more years. And I needed to fail more — in photography, in how I see the world — before I could bring something real to a film.

Twenty years later, I finally felt ready to start. Not because I had mastered anything, but because I had enough experience of loss, of watching people disappear from my life in one way or another, to have something true to say.

The black and white was a decision about honesty. These are not trained performers. My parents are in the film. Close friends. And I didn't want the richness of colour to distract from — or to paper over — the awkwardness or the subtlety in their expressions. In black and white, you can't hide as easily. The imperfections become part of the truth of the image.

The casting was similar — I wanted to weave fictional narratives into their actual lives, so that the boundary between story and lived experience became genuinely blurry. It became a kind of game for them, an opportunity to express feelings they might not otherwise have permission to express. That kind of openness is very hard to manufacture with a professional actor who you've just met.

Completely. The film exists in a kind of in-between time — the ghost is waiting for reincarnation, which is already a suspension of ordinary time. The other characters are caught in their own kinds of waiting: waiting to confess, waiting to grieve properly, waiting to act. Time in the film is not linear in any comfortable sense. I was influenced by filmmakers who treat time as a material — Abbas Kiarostami, Tsai Ming-liang, Takeshi Kitano. These are directors who let time breathe, who trust the audience to sit inside a moment rather than being rushed through it.

In photography, I've always been interested in what a photograph cannot show — what happens in the space between frames. Film gives me more room to explore that in-between space. But the concern is the same.

It's always present, even when it's not the explicit subject. A Singaporean in Hualien. An ex-mistress travelling between Singapore and New York. The ghost herself is displaced — not geographically, but temporally. She belongs to a life that no longer exists. That feeling of being caught between places, between times, between identities — it's something I've lived, and it's something I observe constantly in the Singaporean community wherever I travel.

Singapore is a very small place with very big ambitions and very complicated relationships with memory. When Singaporeans leave, they carry all of that with them. And when they return, they discover that the place they left no longer quite exists. That's the tension I keep returning to.

Because I discovered that film can do something photography cannot. Photography is a record — it arrests time, preserves a moment, creates an archive. Film can simulate the passage of time from the inside. It can show you what it feels like to wait, to lose someone slowly, to carry a secret. I spent twenty years building a photographic practice that tried to get close to those feelings. Film is simply a more direct route to the same territory.

And I'm ambitious. I don't want to just make nice pictures. I want to make work that matters in one hundred years, the way those early photographs matter now. Film gives me another dimension to work in. I would be a fool not to use it.

It was meaningful beyond just my career. Photography in Singapore had for a long time been seen as a craft rather than an art form — technically impressive, perhaps, but not in the same conversation as architecture or graphic design or fashion. The award changed that perception in a formal, institutional way. Suddenly the government was saying: this is design. This is serious. For young photographers in Singapore, I hope it was an encouraging sign. That this path leads somewhere.

For me personally, it felt like a new beginning more than an arrival. I told myself: you've been acknowledged by the establishment, now go and do something genuinely difficult. Don't rest on the award. I think that's the right response to any recognition. Use it as fuel, not as a destination.